As your business develops, over time you’ll start picking up tips, tricks, hacks, and shortcuts that don’t compromise results. This is a huge part of business success and can help you achieve more, faster!
In this blog post, I have drawn on my 10+ years of experience in the HMO industry and will share my top solutions to help you get more out of your HMO business, while allowing you to work less. Read about these nine tips below or listen to the full episode on The HMO Podcast.
1. Adopt the 80-20 Principle
The idea of the 80-20 principle is that 20% of what you do generally equates to 80% of the results. And where 80% of your efforts go, 20% of your results will be driven from that. This means that you really need to be clued up about where you are prioritising your time and efforts.
Most importantly, prioritise income-generating activities. To do this, you need to understand where your time is best served and what you do that generates the best results. Look where you’re spending time that isn’t generating the results you want in your HMO business and find alternative solutions for them.
2. Use the 70-20-10 Model
The 70-20-10 model talks about how to divide your attention among different revenue streams. Having alternative revenue streams is key to any business, but be clear on what your core focus is. As you’re reading this blog post, I’m going to assume your priority is building a HMO portfolio or business, so that needs to be your primary revenue stream and what you spend 70% of your time on.
You should also spend 20% of your time on a secondary revenue stream and 10% on a tertiary revenue stream. Later on, you may add more. However, at the earlier stages, the 70-20-10 model will help you recognise what investment opportunities you should and shouldn’t follow up on and help keep you focused.
3. Focus on the MITs
Next, let’s look at the most important tasks (MITs). With the 80-20 principle, we’ve acknowledged that 80% of results that you actually need to generate will come from 20% of what you do.
Break this down and figure out what key activities you need to be doing every day to reach your goals. Start each day by writing down what you want to achieve in your HMO business.
4. Eliminate, Simplify, Automate and Delegate
Look for areas in your business that you can eliminate, simplify, automate and delegate. For starters, assess your processes, what results are being generated from them, and ask yourself whether any part of that process can be eliminated or simplified. Streamline your processes and add systems in to get the job done quicker.
Then, once that process is working, find out how to automate it. And lastly, look at what you can delegate to staff members so that you can step away from that process once it’s up and running.
Doing this will make your business more productive and profitable. And ultimately, you can then drive better results, generate more income and get more out of your HMO business.
5. Batch Your Processes
We often repeat the same processes week in week out. But if you batch certain bodies of work together, then you can really get much more out of the time that you deploy into the activity.
For example, I suggest setting time aside to deal with all of the low-priority emails in your inbox at one time. I like to do this on Friday afternoons. Batching your processes like this can allow you to spend much less time doing the tasks while getting much more out of your efforts.
6. Remove Distractions
We are all constantly bombarded by distractions, and social media is often the biggest one. Turn notifications off on your phone as that kind of distraction can really get in the way of your work, reducing your productivity.
It usually takes about 30 minutes to get into a flow and a notification on WhatsApp or Instagram can really disrupt that. Be honest about what distractions are getting in your way. Remove what you can, and find yourself a quiet space to work where you won’t be distracted or disturbed.
7. Sharpen Your Tools
Look at what you could learn more about in the HMO industry and running a business. Go away and find out with absolute clarity exactly what you need to do for certain activities, such as being compliant with HMO legislation.
An hour or two spent on figuring out what you need will be a good investment in sharpening the blade. Then, when you do need to use this ‘tool’, you can be much more effective and save yourself time.
8. Start Early or Finish Late
There are some changes you might be able to make to your daily work schedule that will help improve your efficiency. Starting early is generally a good way to tackle your day. This can allow you to look at what needs to be done across the whole business before staff arrives at work.
You can identify priorities, make any important communication and do it without distractions there. This could help you get more out of what you’re doing. However, it doesn’t have to be in the morning if that won’t work for you. You could do this in the evening instead. It’s all about finding a solution that is best for you.
9. Be Proactive and Not Reactive
So much of what you have to deal with as HMO property investors can be dealt with by just being proactive – instead of having to react to things as they happen. One of the great ways to do this is to simply have processes written down and structure in place.
This will take some time, but preempting all of the things that you might have to deal with and dealing with them before they actually happen will allow you to dramatically reduce the amount of time and attention you have to give to them.
I urge you to start adopting these nine solutions into your own HMO business. I guarantee that if you implement all of these, you will find you’re working less and generating better results.
This means you will free up more time to work on the higher priority tasks and activities. You will be getting a better bang for your buck in terms of time, resource, and effort and ultimately become a more profitable business
For more tips and insights on how to start, scale and systemise your HMO property investment business, sign up for The HMO Roadmap now!
About the Author:
Andy Graham is the founder and the lead trainer at The HMO Roadmap! He is also the co-founder of The HMO Mastermind and Smart Property, a specialist HMO property investment and management company. He writes as a regular columnist in different magazines about a variety of HMO topics and is the host of The HMO Podcast! Follow Andy on Instagram!